Gideon's Corpse

28

The West Santa Fe Airfield dozed under a limpid sky. As Fordyce pulled into the parking lot, Gideon made out a single hangar, with a cinder-block building affixed to one end as if an afterthought.

“Where’s the runway?” he asked, looking around.

Fordyce gestured vaguely past the hangar toward a large expanse of dirt.

“You mean, past that dirt area?”

“It is the dirt area.”

Gideon was a poor flier on the best of occasions. In a comfy first-class seat in a roomy jet, with the overhead lighting low and his iPod fired up, noise-canceling headphones, and a cabin attendant to refresh his drink, he could get by, pretend he wasn’t trapped in a flimsy metal tube blasting through the air miles above the ground. He glanced uneasily at the scattering of small planes parked on the dirt. There would be no pretending in one of those.

Fordyce grabbed a briefcase from the backseat, then got out of the car. “I’ll go see the FBO about that rental I told you about. We were lucky to get the Cessna 64-TE.”

“Lucky,” Gideon said unhappily.

Fordyce strolled off.

Gideon sat in the car. He’d always managed to avoid small planes before. This was not good. He hoped he wouldn’t panic, make an ass of himself in front of Fordyce. Too bad the man had a pilot’s license. Calm down, idiot, he thought. Fordyce can handle himself. There’s nothing to worry about.

Five minutes later, Fordyce emerged from the box-like building and waved at Gideon. With a hard swallow, Gideon got out of the car, arranged his face into a semblance of unconcern, and followed the agent past the hangar, past a row of parked planes, to a yellow-and-white craft with an engine on each wing. It looked like a tin bug.

“This is it?” Gideon asked.

Fordyce nodded.

“And you’re sure you can fly it?”

“If I can’t, you’ll be the first to find out.”

Gideon gave him the broadest grin he could manage. “You know what, Fordyce? You don’t really want me along. Why don’t I stay here in Santa Fe and follow up on some of the leads we’ve developed. That wife, for example—”

“Nothing doing. We’re partners. And you’re riding shotgun.” Fordyce opened the pilot’s door, climbed in, fiddled with a few of the controls, then got back out again. He started walking around the plane, peering at this, touching that.

“Don’t tell me you’re the mechanic, too.”

“Preflight walkaround.” Fordyce inspected the ailerons and tail elevator, then opened a little door and pulled out what looked like an oil dipstick.

“Wash the windows while you’re at it, please,” Gideon said.

Ignoring this, Fordyce ducked under one of the wings, at the same time pulling something from his pocket that looked like an oversize syringe with a soda straw inside it. He opened a small cap, pushed the device up into the wing. Bluish liquid drained into the syringe, which Fordyce then held up to the light. A little ball sat in the bottom of the straw-shaped section.

“Now what are you doing?” Gideon asked.

“Checking the fuel for water.” Fordyce continued peering at the light blue liquid. Then he grunted, replaced the fuel.

“You’re done, right?”

“Hardly. There’s a tank in each wing, five fuel points per wing.”

Gideon sat down despairingly on the grass.

When—eventually—Fordyce motioned for him to get into the passenger seat and put on his headset, Gideon felt vastly relieved. But then followed even more exhaustive checks: engine start checklist, taxi checklist, before-takeoff checklist. Fordyce rattled off everything with gusto, and Gideon feigned interest. It was a full half hour before the engines were on and they had moved into takeoff position. Sitting there, in the tiny compartment, Gideon felt a sense of claustrophobia begin to build.

“Jesus,” he said. “We could have walked to Santa Cruz by now.”

“Don’t forget—this was your idea.” Fordyce peered out at the windsock, determining the wind direction. Then, goosing the engines, he slowly turned the plane.

“What if—” Gideon began.

“Shut up for a minute,” Fordyce interrupted, his voice thin and tinny over the plane’s intercom. “We’re doing a short-field takeoff and I have a lot to do if we’re going to clear those.” He pointed to a row of cottonwoods a thousand feet ahead.

Gideon shut up.

Fordyce spoke into his headset. “West Santa Fe traffic, Cessna one four niner six niner, taxiing onto active runway three four for takeoff.”

He adjusted his headset, did a final check of his seat belt harness and door lock, then released the parking brake and throttled forward. “West Santa Fe traffic, Cessna one four niner six niner, taking off runway three four, northwest departure.”

They flounced along the dirt, slowly gaining speed, Gideon holding on for dear life.

“We’re rotating at Vr, one twenty-five KIAS,” Fordyce informed him. “So far, so good.”

Gideon gritted his teeth. The bastard’s enjoying this, he thought.

Suddenly the shuddering and jouncing stopped and they were airborne. The prairie fell away below them and blue sky filled the windows. All at once the plane didn’t seem so cramped. It was agile and light, more like an amusement park ride than a lumbering passenger jet. Gideon felt a small thrill of exhilaration despite himself.

“Climbout at Vx,” Fordyce said. “One seven five knots.”

“What’s Vx?” Gideon asked.

“I’m talking to the flight recorder, not you. Stay shut up.”

They climbed steadily, both engines working hard. When they reached four thousand feet, Fordyce took out the flaps and throttled back to cruising speed. The little plane started to level off.

“Okay,” he said. “The captain has turned off the ‘no talking’ light.”

Takeoff safely past, the engines dialed back to a drone, Gideon almost believed he could enjoy himself a little. “Are we going to be flying over anything interesting?”

The plane suddenly gave a lurch and a rattle, and Gideon gripped his armrests in terror. They were crashing. Another lurch, and another, and he could see the landscape sawing back and forth below them.

“Touch of turbulence at this altitude,” said Fordyce easily. “Think I’ll take her up another thousand.” He glanced over at him. “You okay?”

“Fine,” said Gideon, with a forced smile, trying to relax his steel fingers. “Just fine.”

“To answer your question, we’ll be flying over the Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, Death Valley. We’ll refuel at Bakersfield, just to be safe.”

“Should’ve brought my box Brownie.”

The plane leveled out at the higher altitude, which seemed to be free of turbulence, smooth as silk. Gideon felt a growing relief.

Fordyce pulled a set of aviation maps from his briefcase, placed them on his knees. He looked at Gideon. “Got any ideas about what we should look for on this little trip?”

“Chalker wanted to be a writer. The fact he went to this writer’s conference after getting religion showed it was one of his few interests that persisted post-conversion. Maybe he wanted to write about the conversion itself: remember, the conference was about autobiographical writing. If he gave a copy of a manuscript to someone at the conference to critique—or if someone remembered what he read aloud at a seminar—that might be interesting.”

“Interesting? It’d be dynamite. But if it exists there’s probably a copy on his laptop, which means there are a thousand people in Washington reading it already.”

“Probably. Maybe. But not all writers use computers for their work, and if there was incriminating stuff in there he could very well have erased it. Anyway, even if it’s on his computer, do you think we’ll ever see it?”

Fordyce grunted and nodded. “Good point.”

Gideon settled back in his seat, distractedly glancing at the brown-and-green landscape drifting away beneath them. After a slow start, their investigation was finally picking up—the wife, the mosque, Blaine, and now this. He had a tingling feeling that somewhere, somehow, one of those leads would bring them to a pot of gold.